You fucking idiots haven’t got a clue, have you?
I can’t be bothered to waste words on how stupid everyone is. Keep it up. Communism is only a few macho LIBERAL spectacles away. Looking forward to your no-platforming a single imperialist or corporate parasite in a spectacularly idiotic way. When’s that gonna happen, by the way?
PS: this means I love milo, and nazis and that I’m a liberal, not that clueless, antfucking juvenile adults addicted to violent television doing PR for reactionaries and begging to be played by the security state disgust me.
The Rancid Honeytrap 
is this about the way lots of people seem to be enjoying getting into antifa character and performing the nazi-punching persona as if it were a genre or a signifier for a boutique radical identity, apparently without assessing whether it is useful, indifferent or even self-defeating to do so?
Yes.
I hate that it’s liberal, also, despite all the liberal-bashing these posturing idiots do. Only a liberal would assign this kind of weight to fucking Milo.
I’m reacting specifically to the clusterfuck at UCB.
gotcha. i haven’t really been following that, but i have been a bit alienated by some of the rhetoric around it. fwiw i don’t think words spent on how stupid it is would be wasted. nobody else seems to be saying it.
I don’t have the will. Would rather just blow off steam. Watching people I used to respect going for this shit is particularly revolting.
This is an infantilized culture. All impulse and sensation. No analysis. No perspective. Inability to discern tactical from moral. No sense of proportion. It’s beyond hope. Self-destruction is best case.
that’s pretty much what’s happening too
Liberals that promote islamophobia and/or zionism provide all the fuel for the totalitarian military industrial complex. Don’t see any thing really liberal about them except some liberal/libertarian rhetoric. They don’t get mutual enterprise, they don’t practice the golden rule. Their bigotry belies their liberalism.
As someone on the right, I find these goons LARPing as heroic anti Nazi resistance fighters less annoying than those who want to gloat and approve Nazi punching, but lack the courage to do so.
Yeah I’d hate to see you guys have to resort to punching liberals in Starbucks
Honestly, PCR has laid out tactical measures over and over. You have to consider Saul Bellow’s notion of “Birth is sorrow which can be canceled by intercession,” however. In that, to have any earl hope for transition to take place, there has to be time involved. Despite his dedication of a book to g-wad, he has maintained a lot of impartiality, Pat Buchanan-esque, even outstanding critique laying out u minced decisions for years, now. You can believe or not his Margaret Mead idea of a few can change the world. Sure, one can always hope, but, how can you not factor in large geo- strategic analysis from the author of the only economic plan that may have worked? Did it?
In any event, I think he, too, has been at least, an excellent play- by- play commentator for quite a while. A decent tour guide in our descent into the serial, Dante in the aft.
Despite his dedication of a book to g-wad, he has maintained a lot of impartiality, Pat Buchanan-esque, even outstanding critique laying out u minced decisions for years, now.
Does the government pay you to spout this drivel, or are you just a volunteer idiot? Or perhaps even a robotic sock-puppet?
Have you read PCR’s response today to Harvard’s accusations? Drivel, I say, drivel. Oh, that was not your purpose, to deal with anyone falsely accused, and, your timing is impeccable [sic]. Sorry I mentioned it. Go on with YOUR fantastic narrative!
I have been party to the work of mental_boost, his work by itself I would tout as impeccable, and, particularly to that as of late, a progression Russel and Whitehead would be majorly proud of, if not Mark Twain, or, even so, Alice. So, MuellerGate, yes.
I don’t get what point you are making here. What was wrong with antifa and the succesful blocking of Milo at UC Davis and UCB. As it turns out he wanted to “purge” undocumented immigrants or encourage the audience there to do so.
I don’t have a problem with the protest or attempting to impede the talk. I have a problem with taking clubs and pepper spray to would-be attendees. I don’t think everyone attempting to see MY is a nazi. I think if people are going to start clubbing people and shooting women in the face with pepper spray, the case for being a nazi should be a little more open and shut. But then this whole antifa binge has been entirely bereft of anything like political or tactical coherence from the start, maybe, perhaps because it originated with the fascists at the DNC.
I also find a lot of the rhetoric extremely dishonest. For instance, this alleged purge of undocumented students. I have been unable to find any evidence for this. MY claims his talk was going to be about cultural appropriation. Got a source? Or is it enough that someone made a citation-free claim about doxing undocumented students on Twitter and 2000 dipshits faved it? Of course this unsubstantiated factoid will be trotted out again and again to make critics look like they’re soft on purges.
As is typical with mobs of brain-dead spectacle addicts, suspension of disbelief is mandatory, so there can be no such thing as legit misgivings about this bullshit. Anyone finding any fault with it on tactical or ethical grounds or seeking evidence for claims being made about it is a nazi sympathizer or liberal appeaser, natch.
This is not the basis for a liberating movement. It’s the basis for a Left where anyone talking over a stupid, Marvel comics movie scripted by politically muddled upper middle class, liberal-at-heart poseurs and state provocateurs is a target for abuse. As everyone knows, I’m no free speech zealot, but this shit is authoritarian from top to bottom and just really fucking, cringe-makingly stupid. People issuing wordy, pompous rationales via screenshot for why fucking Milo uniquely threatens civilization would be funny if it weren’t so repulsively idiotic.
Finally, if you think MY lost this round, you’re seriously deluded. As with the stupid Richard Spencer punch, the awesome antifa he-men have enlarged the platform, not reduced it, and look like cowardly, juvenile assholes to everyone but the Laptop Resistance tough guys singing their praises on social media. Breitbart Inc, Milo’s book publisher, the cops and anyone hoping to see reactionary disquiet congeal into something more formidable and self-aware owe you.
The whole thing is a fraud. MILO is an actor. Antifa is Intelligence. It’s a play act- very possibly with some naive truth believers- but a play act nonetheless. A TEEVEE reality show (like the entire US Government, its elections, and all of its politicans, judges, and major named buearcrats.) Aint’ you tired of seeing repeats yet?
they clubbed and maced folks who wanted to see milo? seriously? i’d seen some ‘defund UCB?’ trump headlines, but hadn’t checked the stories out. and although you may have seen this already, *and* if all the subtweets embed as well, you may want to just remove the tweet and give the text. but it’s emblematic of so much you’re saying here.
I said “No, not OLAASM.”
And yes, OLAASM.
Oh of course. Why are you surprised?
I mean, I like the guy, but “Punch a Nazi” is his brand.
Sometimes I feel if people read here they’d rein in this shit a little bit.
If I ever return to Twitter I’m using “Awesome Antifa He-Man”
Yeah, because I’m so widely admired on the internet.
I accidentally give too much credit at times
Not that I’m trying to infuriate you even more but David Harbour’s speech when receiving an award for Stranger Things was great, right up until he started going on about punching people in the face and the feed cut to (1) some black actor I didn’t recognise and then (2) that loudmouthed lesbian comic who talks endlessly about being a lesbian as though there’s nothing else to talk about. The comic in particular seemed ecstatic.
Basically, this is why the Left is losing ground everywhere, because it’s full of smug hypocrites instead of people with principles. Principles might stand as a chance against raw emotional manipulation but smug hypocrisy just gets flattened.
Yeah, you know you’re in the midst of a great revolutionary moment when punching people in the face gets the nod from the showbiz bourgoisie. I am reminded of the fiery speeches and “Punch a President” buttons at SAG and The Golden Globes in 2010 after Obama and Clinton had handed Honduras over to death squads. And who can forget the outrage at the Oscars in 2011, with so many recipients laudably skewering Clinton for her “We Came, We Saw, He Died” cackling just as Islamist ethnic cleansers took control of Libya. “Punch her in the face!” shouted Aaron Sorkin as he accepted his award for The Social Network, establishing what would become a recurring theme for the night.
It’s at least heartening that talk of tactics among the smart set has advanced beyond “Vote.”
I think there’s more to the Left losing ground than smug hypocrites, especially since I don’t consider these people Left in any meaningful sense. At best, it’s a militant, parochial strain of identity politics that objects to a certain kind of *Republican* fascist style rather than to fascism as a whole. It seems useful for nothing apart from advancing the careers of right-wing trolls, and congealing reactionary randos into self-aware brownshirts — Spencer called for this explicitly — while taking the heat off The Democrats and their patrons for laying the groundwork.
I honestly have no use for any politics, particularly a violent politics, that isn’t coherently anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist. Most of these people clearly have no interest in the forces that bring refugees and foreign workers to this country in the first place. Because they’re liberals. So fuck ’em.
Most of these people clearly have no interest in the forces that bring refugees and foreign workers to this country in the first place.
Oh god, yes. Don’t you just love the rebranding of refugees from violence as “dreamers”? What a great way to talk about immigrants without implicating capitalism!
I’ll share my experience walking around the neighborhood– my neighborhood that immediately swept into action following the election, bravely protesting the Trump presidency:
So, I’m walking around and these stupid signs have started appearing– with writing in English, Spanish, and Arabic– “no matter where you are from we welcome you as our neighbor”. very brave! (Of course they would not go so far as to actually live or even venture into an immigrant dominated community.)
Anyway, I get home and what do I have in the mail? An invite to Nextdoor!
This is perfect. Very inclusive.
I had a similar Nextdor invite occasion. Too boring, their “grammar” (this punctuation) just to begin with.
I think maybe the wrong places are being looked at. Usually I ignore NYT but we’ve been getting some wonderful headlines such as:
“THE CIA HAS COME A LONG WAY ON TORTURE”
And
“THE COURT NEEDS JUSTICES MORE LIKE THOMAS THAN SCALIA”
Maybe we should look at liberalism as the gift that keeps on giving instead of an imminent and active threat to humanity. All in the framing.
Really Trump vs. Alphabet Soup is the most interesting sideshow not being paid much attention to right now.
I really think the NYT can be a useful ally in the fight against fascism.
Billionaires truly understand meritocracy and the press is better off in the hands of educated and experienced technocrats.
Remember that time I wanted to say “Because Anarchy Dad?”
2017/02/02/us/anarchists-respond-to-trumps-inauguration-by-any-means-necessary.html
WE TRIED TO WARN YOU
God, that funny, Hummus! So blatantly funny. ouch
Paragon of moral virtue Mayor Bill deBlasio urged me to protest against something so naturally I did.
That guy is an antifa treasure.
“I know a black guy maybe he could come to our protest and be black”
ESSENTIALLY UNIRONICALLY UTTERED IN BROOKLYN LAST NIGHT
No way!
Sky is blue statement sorry
You’re widely admired on the internet at my house!
At mine too! Well, actually it’s just me, so I guess the admiration sort of narrow really.
It’s good to see the occasional person on “the left” realize that these things are being staged in order to generate more support for cultural agents like Yiannopoulos, much like all of the so-called negative publicity for Trump did for his administration. Everyone I’ve encountered on “the right” is still dimwitted enough that they are genuinely pleased by what they perceive as the randomness of these events, and see them as signs that they are organically winning a culture war, rather than being set up by “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” entrapment to carry on the next phase of hell.
I’ve tried to get people on the right to look at what unifies mass media control and the Trump family, and draw the necessary conclusions about Trump, but no luck. I don’t suppose that, now that Obama is over and done with, there’s a chance of getting people on the left to do so, particularly in light of Breitbart, Yiannopoulos, Mnuchin et. al.?
*sigh* Didn’t think so. I look forward to the days when the left stops shying away from genetics.
There’s not going to be a reconciliation on racial issues between those on the left and right who have been pushed out of the mainstream. Temporary alliances on fixing parts of the broken system, like globalization and war mongering, are more realistic.
There is *one* racial issue that transcends everything: poverty, corporatism, empire, and institutional racism. Trump is giving Elliot Abrams another several years of formal power. It has to be becoming obvious by now. Where did Christianity, and Islam, and their oh-so-profitable centuries of antagonism, come from? Where did the assaults on women’s rights and homosexuality begin? Where is a bald-faced genocide being practiced right now in front of the United Nations and the world media without anyone in power putting a stop to it, and who is committing it?
There is one empire, and there is one trans-material one percent that can never be touched except in our imaginations about the past.
If only we could combine the left’s comparative verbal intelligence and systemic awareness with their counterparts on the American right…
thanks for the heads-up, high arka.
http://mondoweiss.net/2017/02/appointing-apparatchik-position/
and i watched some video from the antifa attacks at UCB; didn’t see mace, but the rest: yes.
hummus: who be OLAASM?
Oh please, tell me you were being ironic and that you don’t think that Trump, like Obama, is well-meaning but frightened of the Israel lobby. He is the Israel lobby.
The left needs to come to terms with genetics or it will continue being as ineffectual as the portion of the right that still believes an Invisible Cloud Jew cares about their genitals.
I hate to write the words “prominent twitter anarchist” but, prominent twitter anarchist.
As Tarzie alluded to before, he seems to have been caught up in the rapture of Nazi punching without asking any further questions.
Not sure if it’s more accurate to say OLAASM “got caught up in the rapture of” Nazi punching or “basically invented that shit”. I used to enjoy that rhetoric but I think he’s been retweeting the same “punch a Nazi, break a window” thing all day every day for several years and it does get a little old. If I were still on twitter I would try to start “punch a non-vegan” just to dull the boredom of the inspirational “nazis are bad” strategic breakthroughs and in the vain hope of trying to stir up some kind of feasible politics.
I consider Olaasm a good guy and of minor importance, so if people are going to aim their critique at individuals, please punch a little higher. There are others that I find far more disappointing that I’m not mentioning myself because they’re small potatoes. However, let’s be clear that this is not just an anarchist thing.
I ratify this. I’m also for sticking shit in their food, I mean, besides what’s already there.
“Punch a nazi” really is the “End cancer” of left politics right now. It’s so banal and milquetoast apart from advocating individualist, gestural violence. Voting and assaulting nazis seem to be the beginning and end of US strategy and tactics.
Just generally, I think the “fascism” and “Nazi” in trendy use right now are toxically minimizing. It’s a whitewash for every fascist that doesn’t fit a cardboard cutout definition that places its focus on reactionaries in the genpop and villainous nobodies like Richard Spencer as opposed to the capitalists pulling the strings.
I agree. I think the trendy use of “Nazi” and “fascist” (by which all are pro-Trump anti-Hilary Republicans) comes partly from the way WWII is taught in schools and in the liberal-conservative media: some clueless elements of the far-right gained power through the stupidity and bigotry of the masses and ruined everything against the wishes of the wise liberal elite, but it has also become even more superficial than that. I wonder how many of on the Macho Liberal-Left think Trump is going to do another Holocaust unless they use random, unorganised. unarmed, easily-arrestable violence against non-leaders, and how many think that rather the aesthetics of USA being too-obviously a traditional fascist state are the main problem, and how many just want to give the fascists (including cops etc) an excuse for better armed and better organised violence while making sure the left don’t think that arming themselves, organising or otherwise being strategically smart about self-defence is necessary. But the left also completely lacks ethical practice and denies the necessity and urgency of such practice, so I’m not even sure them being able to defend themselves through organised self-defence would be a much of an improvement. This denial seems to me to a bigger problem than the particular bigotries of the right for the actual victims of fascism/capitalism/imperialism.
“that places its focus on reactionaries in the genpop and villainous nobodies like Richard Spencer as opposed to the capitalists pulling the strings.”
There is real evil. I think Kellyanne Conway has taken it on the chin like no one ever before, just look at her position on the charts related to Jake Tapper, who is by the way, a Wikileaks “entity” that shows up in the Podesta emails. Moving on, however, grin grin, listen to the first minute or two of this Glenn Beck piece (not really with Beck speaking…), beginning about the 1:10 mark.
It’s a popular movement now which people can relate to and participate in without putting their standard of living or standing in their community at risk.
If these peeps did really give about fuck about things they’d be worrying about the children whose tiny fingers made their iPhone.
The first I heard “Dreamers” I thought it is about the nightmares from their homeland (German distinguishes only by a prefix Alb- if it is a nice or a bad dream).
Is it me or are those protesters overwhelmingly “not white/poor”? (despite being on a campus, I think at this point that means nothing anymore) Why are they protesting Milo and not how the big fat system reams us all slowly to unmotivated, drugged dust? Howbout minimum wage laws or some such… (?)
All sorts of shitty ideas that colonize our good liberals’ thoughts– and that liberals imagine to be ‘progressive”, but really represent the wet dreams of the business roundtable- come out of California. But sure, protest Milo.
I have lost count of the number of Trump protests here, but forget Hillary, most of these people would have nothing to say if we were mouthing the words “President Kasich”. Speaking of which, he has released his state budget and surprise, surprise he wants to reduce the income tax brackets from nine to three and raise sale and cigarette taxes. Its not like I think taxes represent the ultimate in power redistribution, but this is the sort of shit that makes many of us poorer. And, it will all be carried out under the radar because TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!
Oh boy my “comrades” are starting to spraypaint hammers and sickles around because they saw the “anarchists” doing it.
Good work guys. If you’re not already on the take there’s only like half a dozen of you dumb enough to do something that and it won’t be terribly hard for them to figure out who committed your brave act of meaningless resistance against vague and distant concepts. Maybe you don’t realize how small this community is.
thank you all for saying for one: that OLAASM is a tweeter; sounded like a jewish rye bread i used to make, but then: why all caps? is it an acronym? yes, a boring account he has.
dunno about the UCB protestors’ make-up, but barbara maclean says:
“As I looked at the photos of women’s marches in Washington DC, San Francisco and all over the world on January 21, I was struck by one thing. Whiteness. The marchers were predominantly white – even in places like Nairobi. Not only were they white, they looked like they were upper middle class – able to afford the finest warm clothes and designer outfits, down jackets, sporting iPhones to record themselves. When interviewed they appeared to be educated and articulate. All of this raised alarm bells in me. Even before the march I had reservations.”
one man at my site ended up at the deecee one to meet a friend coming into town. they got boxed in a corner, and he said those around him said how ‘nice it all is’ and how friendly the police are!’ plus, well-heeled, well-dressed, and quite white. maclean writes of the need to take power, not make demands that serve the capitalist system, etc.
toward the end, she mentions socialist alternative, which group was said to have organized the milo protests, and loved the black bloc stuff.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2017/02/no-pink-wooly-caps-for-me/#more-65495
OLAASM is an acronym, of which I can’t remember the meaning as it’s been sometime.
He isn’t a bad guy he’s just got a one track mind on Nazi punching/tweeting about it. To my knowledge he (at least used to idk anymore) does get out there and do real things, which elevates him beyond most of Twitter
Of course it was mostly white. I reckon it was short on every class of person that can’t just fly to DC on a whim. Half of all USians don’t have more than a 1000 in excess cash on hand. The march had all kinds of problems. Liberal feminism’s gonna liberal feminism.
“Liberal feminism’s gonna liberal feminism” ear to ear grin
I keep thinking up a comment to make but every time I just come to the conclusion that all this Antifa is so ridiculous and suspicious that it doesn’t even deserve the dignity of a full critique. You are right, better (easier?) to just blow off steam.
From “radicalizing” Democrat Imperial-Corporate Feminist Marches headlined by Hollywood celebrities by dignifying their social media photos (without radicals holding signs like “communism now” at an anti-Trump march, the Democrats would have had a 100% transparent Starbucks event), to 500 people protesting at JFK (in an urban area of 10 million people), to punching incels at a PUA workshop and later pretending they were Brownshirts going to hand immigrants over to ICE (why wait until now to worry about ICE ?) , to this:
I like where this is going.
if I didn’t read polls, I would think the American Public is entirely satisfied with Trump and that Antifas were weirdly sucking up to mainstream Democrats, because they are deranged and don’t realize that Democrats will never like them. Antifas are now running this weird balancing act. On one hand, they are basically campaigning against Trump on behalf of Democrats, in a way that alienates everyone. On the other hand, they are alienating Democrats by endlessly attacking Hillary Clinton’s “failure”.
If I didn’t realize that conspiracist theories are the moral failing of conspiracy weirdos, I would conclude that all this Antifa spectacle is another annoying “Psy-op” on behalf of the Republicans (this time), if not on behalf of the Fascist state itself. The generous interpretation is that this is a troll period of Antifa.
But I don’t think any such things because that’s what Nazis do. So I have spray painted the following on my house, to show solidarity with all the Antifas:
SYRIAN IMMIGRANTS WELCOME. SO LONG AS WE HAVE TO BOMB THEM TO SAVE THEM.
PUTIN IS A GOOD COMMUNIST WHO WILL SAVE US ALL.
GO BACK TO RUSSIA, PUTIN.
TRUMP DISRESPECTS WOMEN.
HILLARY ISN’T A FEMINIST.
WHITE PEOPLE ARE TRASH. SEASONAL MIGRANT FIELDWORK MEXICANS WELCOME, AT BELOW MINIMUM WAGE.
DON’T DISMISS PEDO RINGS JUST BECAUSE PIZZAGATE IS A RIGHT WING URBAN LEGEND AGAINST HILLARY. IN FACT, PIZZAGATE IS REAL! (NO LINKS)
DON’T DISMISS PUNCHING NAZIS JUST BECAUSE IT’S FUN. IN FACT, THE ONLY REASON TO EVER PUNCH A NAZI IS TO PREVENT DOXING OF IMMIGRANTS ON CAMPUS, WHICH WAS A LOT OF FUN. (NO LINKS)
The Federation of Atomic Scientists included, among their arguments advancing the minute hand of the doomsday clock, that Russia interfered with the election by releasing private Democrat emails and thus Trump is not a legitimate president and thus the world is less stable.
I give up. I couldn’t make this up. I can’t respect anyone. Nobody cares that they aren’t respected by the public. How is this not just the trolling period of capitalism? Show me evidence that I shouldn’t just sit on a beach and eat coconuts and get coconut-induced diarrhea, waiting for humanity to die off?
One of these two links should show Maxine Waters. Listen to her being coached by the entire Democrat establishment at a press conference when she can’t remember the lines of the current propaganda. How is Antifa more likely than her to respond to honest critique? They’re exactly the same presence of mind.
https://www.mrctv.org/embed/198021
http://www.mrctv.org/videos/rep-maxine-waters-trump-eventually-weve-got-do-something-about-him
Remember that column you wrote about how Jill Stein was selling out to the Democrats? Now, it’s Antifa’s turn.
I can’t wait to see who gets a spot on the merry-go-round next. I’m sure it will be as repulsive and fascist a spectacle of “anti-Fascism” as we’ve seen thus far.
It’s fundraising for anti-fascists who point to Captain America comics where America punches Hitler (because America cares for Jews and Mexicans and Muslims), and go “SEE, AMERICA IS ON MY SIDE IN THE FIGHT AGAINST MILO-NAZISM”.
Antifa calls itself “Antifa” because it’s America’s biggest hugbox. Everyone welcome, so long as you agree to hate Trump and his supporters the most. Nobody ever heard of them, though. So they mostly go to join liberals and give them a veneer of authenticity.
What is their answer going to be? No, they Don’t want hugs? They will dodge the issue of uselessness/corruption/entrapment/co-option by pointing out that it’s better to be in a hugbox than in no box at all.
Extremely tired, stupid voice:
“If we….all come together….then mebee…we all…work together….to change…the world.”
Then they all went off snarking and bullying and climbing the ladder over everyone else’s backs and felt good.
If you can’t even find solace at the margins, then what?
You wrote “Punch a nazi” really is the “End cancer” of left politics right now.
Well, what else can we do but say “end cancer”, at this point?
I think 1% of people identify as vegan. Is that a start or another dead end? Seems to be as likely a success as the Green Party, if not even more pitiful a fight.
I don’t see any useful avenues, so it’s no surprise that your only choices are between circumscribed little cause and social climbing the big ones.
Good stuff.
I’m a little shocked by Greaves pizzagate thing. It is undoubtedly true that the ruling class is rife with pedophiles, and that there are skeevy people involved with that restaurant, but if pizzagate weren’t designed to throw people of the scent of more obvious connections — like to Jeffrey Epstein — it might as well have been. I briefly played the tourist of Pizzagate Youtube and it left me wanting to scream at all these nutty dot connectors. There’s what I call conspiracist culture which attracts these people who look for weirdness and coincidences but without ascribing any meaning or attempting to synthesize their “findings” into a theory. It’s quite wrong to call what a lot of them do “conspiracy theory” because so much of it is so half-baked and dumb.
I definitely believe there are conspiracies — obviously — and view this dipshit culture as something separate from a straightforward assessment of facts pointing to organized ruling class skullduggery.
That said, the researchers have revealed a lot about just general ruling class perversity. The Podestas definitely seem like dangerous sleazeballs.
It certainly feels like the really militant side with these spectacles aims to help a full-on fascist movement congeal and become self-aware. It’s amazing to me that any discussion of what these spectacles are doing for the profiles of people like Spencer and Milo is verboten, considering that we have Trump basically because the Democrats thought it was a good idea to make him the featured bogeyman. This is, at best, religion, where any consideration of practical effects is for heretics only. Spencer was a nobody before the liberal press started following him around. Milo is a provocateur by design, so, of course, any controversy furthers his agenda, especially since his spiel is all about how some imagined Left hates Free Speech.
I don’t think anyone was proposing that veganism is a viable foundation for full-on revolution, but your numbers are misleading. Veganism is quite a bit higher than 1% among millenials, and in terms of growth and seriousness, it is succeeding a good deal more than most other lefty pursuits. It’s not spinning its wheels generally. Which is certainly why the FBI has placed animal rights advocates very high on their Hit Parade.
Basing movement viability on who is already saved is kinda silly. If most people are saved, there’s no need for a movement.
What about the CBS anchor in Atlanta, missing now, Ben Swann, after reporting on this “Descent of Man” topic just once (pizza pizza), his digital identity erased, FB Twitter (remember Indira Singh, disappeared, first, this way, or digitally) “hopefully a protected witness,” but, more of the nobody-has-really-seen-Assange “spectacle” of internet “porn” trafficking” incest” bad acting” the pit” who knows” what’s wrong…?
Or, really, and let me say on the nazi topic, this is a Nick Kollerstrom issue ALL-THE-WAY, from his pamphlet, “How Britain Initiated Both World Wars,” thereby agreeing with this foray into the useless and usury-filled topic of the same that Beck promulgates, perhaps, he, TOO, has addressed the George Soros issue like no one I have seen to date, on the web, admittedly. Friggin cattle call Glenn Beck got after doing his small series on Soros, telling him he was just a face in the crowd, well, there IS something missing in a big big way, but, he made some headway for showing just how obvious it is, or would be, if there was a liberal that understood English, I think.
Tarzie is correct that I don’t see veganism as a viable strategy by itself for overthrowing the ruling class and installing a dictatorship of us. I don’t see it as an optional political cause either though. Non-veganism is wrong like the rape of children is wrong, and the fact so many people are not vegan only makes the scale of the harm that much greater and the urgency of being vegan and supporting veganism more urgent. Even if one only measures harm to humans, or to the poor or the non-wealthy, or to the working class, non-veganism still does more harm than anything that else that nobodies on the swastika right are likely to do. Apart from non-veganism being a violent and systematic crime against the innocent excused by bigotry, it only relates to the left in that a self-proclaimed progressive movement of leftists who violate the innocent or burn-down native forests for pleasure or what you will is less worthy of support and more likely to self-cannibalise and therefore weaker than it would be if it had a bare minimum of decency.
You completely nailed it. There’s no real decency in any of these fuckers. You’re anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist AND vegan or you’re not worth a fuck.
oh, my. i don’t want to be here under false pretenses, as i’m not vegan. i’ll skedaddle, while realizing that i don’t play/think/analyze at your collective levels in any event. cheers to all.
not everyone here is a vegan, wendy, but I make no secret of thinking they should be. I don’t go out of my way to welcome racists, sexists and imperialists either. it kills me how vegans are expected to kiss the ass of people with politics and practices they find reprehensible. I don’t do that. I think vegans should be more intolerant than most of them are, in fact.
The meat/dairy industry is unspeakably cruel — to people and non-people both — and is ruining the planet. So I can’t take any leftist seriously who unthinkingly participates in it. Before you depart, maybe hazard an argument for how someone who claims to want a better world can exploit animals and foul the environment in good conscience.
as you hadn’t invited me to shove a cactus up my ass, as someone had this week at another site, i will explain why i’m not a vegan. it won’t be anything like making a case at large, but my own story. but for today i’m watching the ‘final stand’ at standing rock, and trying to find out how and where to arrange a nursing home/hospie placement for mr. wd’s 98-yr-old father in NE.
there’s no news from the area by way of twitter and i’m wondering if the PTB haven’t ordered all cell sevice in the area jammed.
but as soon as some time frees up, i’ll say why.
I was not under the impression that everyone here was vegan already, nor do I have the will or authority to prohibit non-vegans. I was not yet vegan myself when I first encountered this blog years ago. I wonder if I would have been been scared off by aggressive veganism at the time, but I doubt it, because I always saw fact, analysis and theory as something that should have practical implementation in our lives, something that should continually challenge and improve our practice. I don’t think I was ever the type that would rather abandon discussion or make a straw Jesus to poke holes with plant-souls than consider changing my own behaviour in ways that are easy, effective, ethically imperative. I think it is better to have no facts, no analysis, no discussion and no theory than to have them used only as a distraction from practice rather than as a tool for improving our practice. There should be a special name for the non-vegans who refuse to even consider the possibility of being vegan themselves. I-will-never-be-vegans, go, I banish ye.
Of course not everyone who reads me is a vegan and, of course, living a vegans-only life is impossible. I simply think that being a conscientious person on the liberal-to-radical spectrum is entirely incompatible with animal commodification and am inclined to say so from time to time. I’ve yet to encounter a convincing argument to the contrary. If that feels inhospitable I’m fine with it. When I ate meat I knew what I was doing was wrong. So anyone who gave me shit for it was perfectly entitled.
“You’re anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist AND vegan or you’re not worth a fuck.”
Of course, the vast majority of political vegans have absolutely shitty pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist, anti-environmental, anti-worker, anti-farmer politics, as well as being utterly ignorant of agriculture and agricultural economics as such. Their lead point usually is to stress their support for the industrial commodity grain model; they just want this abominable product to be fed directly to humans. Nor do there seem to be any anti-capitalist vegans who want to improve the political consciousness of that movement. Only on rare occasions have I encountered vegans with the necessary abolitionist mindset.
Anyone minimally familiar with agronomy and agricultural economics, and what being an anti-capitalist vegan actually would mean, knows what it requires. It requires the same thing required by every other economic, ecological, and socioeconomic crisis – the abolition of corporate industrial agriculture and the global deployment of agroecology on the social/political basis of Food Sovereignty. (That’s not the only thing required, but it’s the main thing.)
This is fully documented and demonstrated in scientific theory and decades of practice, it’s ready for full global deployment, lacks no physical or intellectual resources among those available right now, and therefore is blocked by literally nothing but political will – the will of capitalists and their supporters to block it, the lack of will among alleged “progressives” and “radicals” to commit to it. Including how all “radicals” greatly prefer microscopically trivial nonsense to movement-building based on great ideas, obviously something out of style these anti-political days. Which is why the explicitly or implicitly pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist model of vegan “politics” which basically wants to keep the entire status quo intact but just magically remove the eating of animals from the structure (maybe this will be flown out on winged ponies or float out on snowflakes) is the model preferred by almost everyone I’ve seen.
True enough. But I don’t find capitalist vegans any more objectionable on political grounds than anti-capitalist non-vegans, and I think the former are probably putting their politics into actual practice more than the latter. I’ll also cop to preferring a capitalist system that puts the grain directly into humans if I have only two choices. I don’t think removing animal-eating from the structure is trivial, any more than removing human slavery was.
Always nice to see you here, by the way.
Thanks for the welcoming words.
I was thinking about it more while shoveling snow. I often feel like the moral imperative against animal cruelty could be a potent part of a broader social/cultural/political movement to build food sovereignty and to abolish industrial agriculture, if enough people who held this moral position really followed through on the inherently anti-capitalist implications of it. That is, if they really made it an imperative and not something negotiable.
That’s why this particular version of the usual liberal and pseudo-radical pattern of attitudinizing in an ad hoc, non-ecological, non-political, consumerist way is so frustrating. (It’s also true of most anti-pesticide people; especially these days they’re all off fantasizing about defending the honor of the EPA.)
I feel your frustration. I think more people would connect their particular concerns to anti-capitalism if there weren’t a 24-7 disinfo effort to keep that from happening operating on every possible front. This atomization of political movements isn’t accidental. It’s the result of tremendous Ruling Class effort.
That said, I’m not one of those who thinks incremental change within capitalism is inimical to something more radical further on. I think taking animals out of the food system is an unqualified good and that any vegan for any reason is contributing. I also think that the revulsion ethical vegans feel at the treatment of animals suggests political potential that whatever people who don’t give a shit are feeling does not. Once you rule out the torture and extermination of animals, you’ve pretty much ruled it out for humans too, except through tremendous rationalization and denial.
I think a lot of animal rights people are very single-minded because they see the abuse of commodified animals as exponentially worse in both acts and scale than what most humans endure. They’re interested in immediate harm reduction. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
I hear you. I agree that in addition to their socioeconomic, agronomic, environmental, and public health evils, CAFOs are a moral abomination, exactly the same as the worst of concentration camps for humans. For all these reasons they call for the most thorough-going abolition as the non-negotiable ultimate goal.
And I’m all for incrementalism where it’s on the right vector toward the ultimate goals. I just question whether the pro-capitalist “you can have it all” rhetoric evinces a mindset which has any intention or desire to move beyond consumerist campaigns which are highly unlikely to change anything anyway. To me it sounds more like gate-keeping disinformation. There’s all sorts of that within the broad food movement as well as among people like the apostles of that kind of rhetoric, who I view as interlopers from outside. (They know nothing about food, agriculture, or the history and politics of either, and in my experience don’t want to know. Of course that’s also true of many/most within the movement.)
The exchange down-thread where you talk about “leveraging the disquiet of people who are half-awake but not politicized yet” applies to how I view all these food and agriculture matters. It seems like the people already involved in campaigns and “education”, especially the most online-focused, are the kind of person who readily becomes “political” in a pro-system, consumerist way, but who by the same token will never go beyond that in thought or action.
I’m wagering there’s a much broader disquiet (basing that mostly on intuition, common sense, and knowledge of history) which hasn’t yet become politically visible, precisely because most people who might want to become politicized can sense the pointlessness of doing so within the forms currently on offer.
My bet is that if anyone can offer a truly new, affirmative idea and movement context which would truly arise outside the system and truly against it, this could start mustering such previously inchoate disquiet. And such an organic growth, relying only on its own indigenous forces, who would be people who don’t know anyone but one another, didn’t go to school with anyone, didn’t work with anyone in this system political campaign or at that system NGO, would be much harder to co-opt.
I agree, but it’s tough going when all other political effort works against that ever happening. A big question is how do you keep the riff raff out or at least subordinate when things get rolling.
I think most co-optation has to do with impatience for system-defined “results” (e.g. running candidates for public office and winning these races) and the related sense that one has to rush to deal with the system on something far less than one’s own terms. Both of these in turn reflect a lack of confidence in and commitment to anything beyond reformism (and usually a lack of desire for anything beyond this). For example, it always seemed to me the main problem inherent to OWS and other complaints/protests from student debtor types is that they still dream they’re going to get those great jobs the banksters/government/universities/media promised them. In their minds they haven’t yet burned their bridges. Therefore their complaint and protest boils down to, “When do I get mine?”, and they’re predisposed to listen to any scammer who can give a new gloss on the same old lie. But until one burns these bridges once and for all, one’s already pre-co-opted no matter what nominal protest one embarks upon. Conversely, once a committed core of rejectionists has cohered, they’re in a better position to propagate their ideas through all media, make tactical alliances and such, without being stampeded into the wrong kinds of action prematurely or distracted from their focus on the long run movement work.
I base much of my concept on my study of the 19th century Populist movement in America (I also think the Russian movement offers some lessons, as far as what to do about the simple inability to propagate the ideas, even though the reason for this inability is different), how it built itself, how it fought, how it ultimately failed because inherent weaknesses forced it into presidential politics before it was ready, and therefore how the same old Democrat Party co-opted much of its energies and helped the banks destroy it.
I don’t know what this “ruling class is riddled with pedos” means anymore.
These pedo theories always classify consenting sex with a 16 year old as pedophile rape. They liken everything to the Catholic Church raping little boys in their home for wayward boys beds.
If there is a cabal of oligarchs trading sex slaves, I’d like to see evidence. What did Jeffrey Epstein do? Hire an 18 year old on his jet with Prince Andrew. That’s the “Lolita Express”. This is pure provocative salaciousness. Epstein also was arrested for getting a 12 year old to grab his crotch or being naked around her, for cash. Very very dangerous man. So dangerous he couldn’t even pay a teen to give him a handie without the cops nabbing his oligarch ass. I guess he didn’t have enough money to keep her quiet.
I don’t doubt that many people who can get away with violent abuse will do it. Why is it always so much innuendo and it always points to teens, and it’s always consensual or paid or even less, like being weird around teens they work with, of late? How many times do I have to read something like “and she said he walked into her changing room without knocking, stared, then walked out, pretending it had been an accident” before I’m allowed to conclude that this doesn’t rise to the level of sex crimes I should bang on about to bring down the Fascist State?
Podesta the pervert? I haven’t looked deeper into the Pizzagate because I came to the conclusion before Pizzagate that all of this “the rich are pedo ring operators” is just an effort to attack the rich by people who find it insufficient to point out the mountains of cash that motivate the rich in their total destruction of everything sacred.
If Podesta has a history of dangerous perversion, all I have heard from the amateur investigators is this “Spirit Cooking” game cum book cum work of art by that woman artist friend of Hillary. No doubt all these people are deep into all the most murderous business but if we’re going to hang them on sex crimes, I’d like something a little more honestly evil than dinner made from 2 drops of blood and semen, with a witch hex chanted over it. The conspiracies make Podesta dinners seem like yuppified wiccanism. Maybe Ted Cruz can be outraged.
Maybe there is evidence for sex slave networks and predation. Don’t tell me Pizzagate is real without at least one shred of evidence because, as much as I know I should be more objective, this s-e-x angle on the evil rich has burned me too many times. So I am not going down that rabbit hole again. There is sex trafficking, I don’t pretend the rich aren’t involved. This is part of general crime. “The rich are all pedos”. Yeah and so are the Pakistanis in England, with their teenage prostitutes abused into their gangs. And the California police departments, with their teenage girls passed around secretly. Can we get off of calling this a pedo ring? No, because Antifa has taken it up as one of its causes. While they laugh at everything else they don’t have any knowledge of. Greaves is trying to fit in with the lot of them. I’m sure his Twitter followers, like everyone against Trump, have gone up and now is the time to show his Antifa passion.
Tilting at windmills is what I mean about veganism. If you think there is real potential for growth, then that’s a justification for considering it a more viable movement in itself. If you just want to be virtuous by pushing the issue, then it too becomes like an “end cancer” campaign.
I notice that veganism online is very intense. That young people, while more likely than the older generation, to have concerns for the ethics and environmental impact of their food, are not however as a generation, really considerate about this. I don’t expect so much more from the young than the old have demonstrated. There is general awareness of environment that has grown among the older generations, too. What if all the people who do care, already care, and all we can do now is watch as it isn’t nearly enough to make a difference?
I think the biggest appeal of veganism is that it can make a big difference to the world. If all it can do is make nice people too horrified to eat another burger, then, that’s nice, but how many animals will that save? How much environment will that save?
I’m open to being chastised on the percentage because I certainly don’t stand by the polls I have read. I don’t trust them, they may be in bed with Big Meat making up those numbers to dissuade anyone from trying.
It’s useful not to confuse activists with the passive inertia of the general population. If you want to save some poop from the men’s room on a corner of TP and then put that surreptitiously in somebody’s burger, that’s virtuous. But will it really get that burger chomper to give up burgers? That matters to me.
Will this work like Abolitionism? There is enough to suggest it won’t. “We have to try” sounds like “We have to stick together”, to me. I’m still going to keep trying but it’s depressing A.F.
It’s always so weird when you’re reading one of these things and some bourgeoisie comes out with Judeo-Christian plant-based dieting theories…it’s like reading right-wing blogs, everything seems normal, and then suddenly there’s some person saying that Jesus Christ is personally invested in the latest election and/or playoff game. Is it droll humor or mundane idiocy? One never can tell.
Do animals have souls that plants do not? There’s always some religion claiming yes or no. Do we generate this kind of crap internally, or is there some manner of government program attempting to inject divisive philosophies into organizations that might otherwise produce tangible change? My money’s on both all at once.
Do tell of these wonderful organisations that *would* be producing tangible change, but for the scourge of veganism and its god, Yahweh.
I don’t just think there is “potential for growth”. It seems to be a movement that is growing, though not as fast as it could if it had more support, and as it grows it has a direct effect that is quite different from the whitewashing effect of Green parties and and the other the parts of the effectively-meat-capitalism-supporting Left.
However, I think it should be obvious that “I’m not going to help this movement grow faster because it’s not growing fast enough” is self-contradiction.
It should be almost as obvious that where one chooses to put one’s money is not a politically neutral decision, and that actively financing and condoning the most egregious forms of exploitation, environmental destruction, bigotry, corporate dishonesty and imperialism while campaigning for movements that claim to oppose these things is to undermine one’s own professed goals.
When it comes to punching non-vegans, my point was simply that it makes at least as much sense as punching Nazis and that it would be a more original idea and therefore more likely to effect some kind of change. Obviously there is a difference between punching a pro-meat celebrity chef and punching an uneducated non-vegan who doesn’t even know why they’re being punched, but in any case punishing someone for eating animal products makes at least as much sense to me as punching someone for wearing a swastika. I’m not promoting either as as an amazingly effective way to effect change, but being vegan is at least as important as not wearing a swastika if you actually care about real-world outcomes.
This probably isn’t the best place to discuss it, but I’m curious about how various plant-based moral philosophies don’t connect to Judeo-Christian morality regarding the superior spiritual value of animals compared to, say, centenarian trees, integrated forests and/or other ecological or geological systems, and bacteria or prions. Considering that walking around and breathing kills lots of living things, what makes animals so different, e.g. unworthy-of-eating-as-opposed-to-plants, if not a traditionally WASPish conception of a soul?
I am assuming Tarzie doesn’t mind until he tells me otherwise.
I don’t necessarily think that all animals have superior moral value to all trees. It depends on which tree you are comparing to which animal. I don’t think I’m the only vegan who thinks a cententarian tree is more valuable than a single ant. Non-veganism is probably the main cause of deforestation, and definitely the main way that the average person contributes to land, water and other resource waste. So it’s quite irrelevant to veganism. If you care more about trees than cows, that’s fine; go vegan for that reason. It really doesn’t matter. However, there is a clear scientific basis for neurons as markers of sentience. Certainly most vegans recognise trees as having moral value primarily because they are appreciated and relied on by sentient beings called animals and including humans. But this is philosophy. Veganism is not just the philosophy of moral value of non-human animals nor is it just the science of sentience. Non-veganism harms almost everyone and almost every living thing including almost all humans, excepting the small number who rely on the meat industry for profit more than they rely on its competitors.
Many vegans are atheist and vegetarianism globally is more common among non-Judeo-Chrisitans, especially in religions of Indian origin, which again should be irrelevant, since if Judeo-Christianity invented veganism, veganism would still have all of its merits and guilt by association would nonetheless be a fallacy even if it weren’t such a tenuous association.
That sounds like Christianity to me, except that you’ve substituted “sentience” for “soul.” Where is your proof that other animals, let alone humans, possess sentience? If you have such a strong faith in that concept that you’re not open to discussing the issue, I’ll understand. Still, though, I’d be curious. Different types of people have different types of neurons and slightly different brain structures, and certainly “animal” species differ in that way from humans and from one another. Why do plants’ slower form of consciousness, or non-neuron-based existence, or whatever you’d call it, make them unworthy of life, while animals’ comparatively faster perceptions, or “more like us” brain structures, make them more worthy?
Some of what you’re writing makes it sound like you’re essentially pragmatic about whom you want to kill, and when. For example, you’d slaughter a cornfield to spare a bovine, or eliminate an acre of soy to preserve a redwood. What makes one better than the other? It sounds like eugenics on a different scale, where you want to subjugate/consume forms of life that you view as “less valuable,” and replace them with superior forms.
Do you know what sentience is? Making its existence in humans subject to debate is so idiotic it defies belief. I have to say a part of me admires the born troll’s willingness to feign stupidity. I’m far too vain for that. But I’ve yet to figure out what itch you assholes come here to scratch. Surely there are better uses for willful self-effacement.
Oh, and regarding the bourgeoisie, there’s this awfully orientalist zeitgeist going on whereby westerners lament that the growing economies of China and India are causing more people there to prefer (and to be able to purchase) meat, just like they’re preferring (and becoming able to purchase) more tchotchkes than previously. Modern pop veganism of the type engaged in by Generation X and the Millennials sprang out of the 1980s-1990s concern over the Chinese and Japanese buying too much property in California, and over India modernizing and starting to have more demanding modern consumers. It’s embarrassing to see self-professed leftists complaining about how immoral it is for meat to be eaten, now that Asians are having a lot more of it than they could previously afford.
This would be hilarious simply as disingenuous cardboard cutout anti-vegan pseudo-anti-racism, but particularly so from someone who’s been obliquely touting global Jewish conspiracy since they got here. This is why leftists can’t have nice things. Cause most of them are ignorant, disingenuous, booj nitwits that say trollish shit like this in complete seriousness, while complaining about divisiveness.
Go bore someone else, you ignorant, bigoted, grandiose idiot.
Your earlier comments were at least partly disingenuous, but I decided to take your questions seriously in case you were genuinely interested in comprehending my response and for the benefit of anyone else who might be reading. Now that you have descended further into illiterate non-reader and obvious troll territory, I won’t be engaging further. Ciao.
Good idea. High Arka is an asshole of long standing. Been banned before. The haughtiness tempered with abject stupidity is sure appealing though.
Don’t ever leave, poob. Your comments are blog-worthy.
Nice. I’m glad you like them.
“Don’t tell me Pizzagate is real without at least one shred of evidence because…”
I don’t want to have to bring up such facts that might seem without regard, but David Seaman is someone whose recent past should be put into some light here.
I take a huge risk in online Antifa circles just saying “I don’t know, I’m not interested in Pizzagate” unless they lean Democrat and deny Pizzagate not so much out of skepticism but of loyalty to their Democrat voting asses. If I say Pizzagate sounds dumb, then I’m covering up for Pizzagate because I known something, I must be involved. Sex crimes is one of the dumbest areas of Antifa concern trolling now. It really is “concern porn”. Which is where that whole stream of sex worker rights becomes more important than environment or economy. It is so DUMB and WEIRD to have to see these sexually salacious stories blown out of proportion but that seems to be a subculture with some popularity among the Antifa these days, as on the Right.
I also get burned not just because the stories are often empty but because they really do end up becoming conspiracies that distract from bigger, real conspiracies. And there are tinges of racism, anti-semitism and just obvious partisanship to them. This is the crazy thing. The Antifa get to pretend they are so virtuous and the bad guys, over there, who aren’t even Liberals, when a lot of what they accuse Milo’s followers of believing, they believe themselves. BDS is not anti-semitic, and yet, aside from the feds trying to subvert it by pretending to be BDS activists and then pushing an anti-semitic take, there is more subtle anti-semitism among Antifa. It’s a real messy scene. I think it’s because of all this dumb chanting, where ideas are never hashed out on or critically examined. People stay in their hugbox.
I don’t know shit about Pizzagate either but the pedo stuff is real. The internet takes things places and runs with it but there is a very real history of this type of shit happening and other factions of power looking the other way, mostly because it gives them leverage over the pedos.
Start here, in the UK. There’s quite a lot!: https://www.google.com/search?q=UK+pedophilia+scandal&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
You’ll notice it’s even in mainstream outlets and it’s all very contrite and “all the perpetrators are dead or too old to be held to account and this certainly doesn’t happen anymore.” It’s yet another reason to burn everything down.
@Hummus
What do you think of the Rotherham and many other UK pedo/grooming rings?
Interesting Factoid: Dennis Hastert and Tony Podesta were on a young people’s ambassador trip to Japan.
I don’t know what else to think beyond “that’s pretty much the bottom of human depravity right there” and makes me encourage everyone to start thinking about potd again
Here is something from 1989 in Australia, for more “connectivity” facts.
BONUS IMAGE: Hummus at #J20
I know about the UK controversy. I call it controversy because I have the same questions about that. Having said that, the UK government pedo ring controversy is the scandal that brought some questions about the government but none about sexuality. Indeed, when Lena Dunham is called a pedophile and her sister defends her actions, saying that this reactionary attitude towards “queerness” as she called it, is insane, you have to raise an eyebrow.
We have progressed, from the uninvestigated case of the U.K. government and BBC,
to Lena Dunham was a teen pedophile touching her sister (she’s Ruling Class, after all) and Anthony Weiner victimized teen girls as a pedophile (who else gives out dick picks to teens except pedophiles, and ruling class ones at that).
I hadn’t bothered to read Greaves’ thread but it’s a gold mine of contributors to the conspiracy that distracts from real conspiracies. I’m sure this will all lead to productive ends.
“even spurious claims”.
https://twitter.com/AndyKirn/status/829271580920397825
https://twitter.com/FabianJanowski/status/829323842220912641
It just goes on and on. At no point do the all these courageous souls banging at the gates of Podesta’s Babylon ever share a hint of the factoids they’ve read up on, unlike the skeptics who are too busy making money on Chapo Trap House with pedophile jokes approving of pedophilia (I didn’t know you could do that! ).
It so dumb and dishonest a part of me wonders if Greaves and company aren’t trying to discredit the UK scandals by flogging this hogwash so incompetently. It reads like satire. Everything a mirage and a false flag shitshow.
Jessions,
You’re overly concerned about maintaining mainstream credibility, and the “distracts from real conspiracies” charge is a canard.
The problem with the Pizzagate shit isn’t primarily that the claims are spurious. The problem with it is that it’s primarily a partisan information op. It’s not primarily designed to cast light on the very real violence perpetrated by networks of elites on vulnerable children. It’s primarily designed to win an election for Republicans, something many (even people who despise Democrats) understandably do not want to be complicit in. Levine seems to understand this point but Phil seems to miss it, or else he’s insufficiently bothered by it (maybe it’s his UK focus) . But Phil’s point about the kneejerk dismissal of Pizzagate by liberals matters, bc the vast majority of the liberals laughing at Pizzagate are not doing so after a careful study of its merits and the drawing of their own conclusions. It’s a ritual laugh.
Since you’ll never win mainstream Democrat types over to an honest concern for elite perfidy, you can stop worrying that radicals demean themselves by not immediately denouncing discredited bullshit in precisely the way required of them by liberals. The very same liberals ridiculing any reference to Pizzagate show absolutely zero interest in determining the true scope of elite crimes of this sort, how they overlap with law enforcement and judicial bodies to permit the continuation of the worst horrors, what happens to those who try to expose these networks to the light of day, etc. They show ZERO interest. If they were shown unequivocal evidence that leaders in the Democratic and Republican parties were part of an organized effort to destroy kids, they’d look to see if the info could be weaponzied against Republicans without their own getting caught up in it, or else they’d cover it up. Republican operatives would do the exact same thing of course, and have DONE the exact same things. Liberals who are identical to Republicans in only giving a shit about partisan gain can go fuck themselves, and that’s most of them.
It’s similar in it’s way to the discredited Rolling Stone story. Frankly, why should we care that the primary narrative was a lie? Who gives a shit that the writer bought it when it fairly clearly reeked of bullshit? The main point of the story is not AT ALL injured by the lie: rape culture is rampant on college campuses, and administrators are far more interest in university brand than they are in seeing victims of sexual assault receive justice. Were it not for the infantile and utterly counterproductive conventions of mainstream journalism, the story wouldn’t even have NEEDED a breathless first-person account filled with alleged horrors to lead it. The rape culture focus would have been sufficient. Yet even well-reported stories that undeniably expose toxic rape culture feel the need to lean on individual accounts:
https://www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/reported-sexual-assault-notre-dame-campus-leaves-more-questions-answers
So I can’t back the handwringing over “spurious claims” in this arena. Even though Pizzagate is a partisan information op and I want to emphasize that, it’s also true that genuine victims often make spurious claims about their abuse. Why? Because they’ve been so badly damaged that they just do. It can be hard for them to separate the true from the false, despite the obviousness of the fact that serious abuse took place. An over-focus on absolute fealty to truth only strengthens a system so horrible that those who emerge from it – if they emerge from it at all – may do so with diminished capacities for separating the real from the imagined. It’s difficult.
“It’s primarily designed to win an election for Republicans,”
The 400+ California arrests were not “real” it appears. That is bad. Bad acting, but orchestrated by the likes of anchors such as Jake Tapper, truly emblematic of something rigidly geared for this “sport.” What is real?
@High Arka
I rather like the vegan argument that uses the Bible to prove that God’s giving of the animals and plants to man, means that man has a duty to care for them. The right wing religious position is that since God gave them all to man, man may dispose of them in any way, with any cruelty, he likes. At least it reaches that audience.
I remember when The Intercept started up, one of their first releases was an espionage manual about how to disrupt workplaces.
Waste time. Call useless meetings. Make dumb suggestions. Initiate projects that will hurt the business. Misplace things.
Everyone was joking that the government didn’t need to come disrupt their office, it already worked that way!
Tarzie, I received an e-mail notification about your 8:01 PM reply to me, but it’s not showing up here. Did you delete it? I saved a .PNG of most of it when I couldn’t find the original here on the site–do you want to use it to recover something you lost?
No. I decided better to just ignore you until I inevitably bounce you.
Are you sure this isn’t some sort of automated Zizekian nonsense generator?
Zizekian! Wow!
HUMMUS LIVE: somewhere on a corner on nostrand in CH probably until I’m bored.
It’s always curious to see the uniformity of discourse from different corners.
The Chinese “news” (propaganda) takes the American Liberal’s position toward Trump. Trump is a fascist Nazi, much worse than Obama. The word Nazi itself is co-opted by the fascist state. It becomes irrelevant.
What are Nazis? Oh, just some stupid word Democrats use to get you to vote for Clinton next time.
Antifa are often eager to imagine that China or Russia will come and save America by defeating the U.S. oligarchy with their anti-imperialism, if only because they are U.S. enemies and the U.S. is the only effective imperialist in the world today. Still, it makes me cringe when I see China trying to appeal to liberals, to back them up, to criticize America using the safest current rhetoric of mainstream liberalism.
How “Antifa” does it feel when China runs a media campaign that could have been crafted by a Democrat marketing outfit?
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/cartoon/2017-02/06/content_28109848.htm
I’m not sure I recognize this antifa you’re talking about. The ones I see are too parochial to even consider other countries — like Ukraine, for instance — commensurate with their inability to recognize any domestic fascism too cool to evoke Hitler’s cartoon standard. The exceptions are the really dubious ones that market US foreign policy on anti-fascist grounds.
Parochial is fair. I see more of a Big Tent spectrum this past month. As well as that whoever calls themselves Antifa I take to be part of that group. Say, if a communist makes common cause with Black Bloc or with liberals for the purpose of a rally against police brutality, I consider them all as Antifa. In general these people are at each other’s throats but they melt together easily enough when the opportunity arises.
Those better read anti capitalists will comment on any number of foreign countries. It depends on where they are from and what their pet cause may be. As of now it is impossible to separate factions as different as the Wall Street Feminists from the Black Lives Matter community activists from first time protestors. I guess I am thinking of the most pompous, internationally looking activists and generalizing it down to their new friends. Is this such an incorrect approach? If we are to restrict ourselves to the identities within the umbrella of Antifa there won’t be much to say about the movement. Only anecdotes about individuals.
That said, please tell me I’m so disconnected and my corner is so small that I haven’t even heard of the AOA Antifa of America, registered with the FEC and composed exclusively of anti-racists opposed exclusively to Nazi and KKK marches and right wing speakers on campus. Alas, such a clear badge of limiting analysis is not their thing.
If you just want me to agree then certainly, the parochialism and ignorance of theatrical Antifas today makes them useful idiots. Fivek is a spectacular exception of eerily, seedy suspiciousness. If you look at just who follows Fivek, they are enough of them so low profile that their own concerns about Ukraine, Yemen, Syria, and other countries that barely get a mention even at the fringes of American Activism suggests that this gassy idea of Antifa is pretty widespread among people who would be better off identifying as communist or environmentalist, if only to get more useful ideas for themselves than mere news gathering.
I wasn’t stridently objecting and a global approach makes sense. I just didn’t know who, exactly, you’re talking about. Antifa certainly spans a lot of politics but I am thinking of a political type whose overwhelming political concern is with a certain overt, old fashion fascism that, with the exception of urban police forces, is overwhelmingly Republican. Within that constraint, this group I am thinking of is disproportionately concerned with would-be brownshirts in the general population, not too worked up about Homeland Security or imperialism — at least when liberals control them — and entirely oblivious to shit like fascists in Ukraine. Will you not agree that this describes a capital A Antifa type?
.
An interesting quandary. My overton window is slightly to the left of yours on this point. What you describe as anti-Republican type street rad, I would categorize as mere liberal. The reason there is this confusion is because the overlap is so possible, within identity politics. Unless you press someone on other issues, while discussing, say, police brutality, it will not be obvious whether they will go home and plot the end of capitalism, obsess over some military maneuvers by NATO or just go canvassing for the lesser evil Democrats next election.
I don’t feel comfortable just conceding that capital A Antifa are all essentially middle class booj who are politically addicted to pointing out that Republicans are making Jeff Sessions the AG, who will have a policy of police immunity for murdering African Americans and that Betsy the Amway lady has donated to conversion therapy. I know what you are talking about but it just doesn’t sit right with me.
Fair enough. My assessment may be too narrow and caricatured and is based almost exclusively on social media. You’re right that identity politics spans everything and therefore causes confusion. However, the focus on the overtly racist features of fascism could be seen as making my point. These people can be understood as much by what they don’t do as what they do. I recall that in 2012, people calling themselves antifa found Ron Paul’s racism far more objectionable than Obama’s murderous imperialism and the war he waged on undocumented immigrants. A tactical alliance with ostensibly anti-imperialist Paul was unthinkable in a way that alliance with less overtly racist, uber-imperialist Obama clearly was not. The quaint notion that there can ever be only one racist/fascist candidate for president is pure liberal stupidity and seems to have carried over into the Trump antifa derangement.
Snow day, a Greaves vs. Fivek fight, and turbo comments enabled this is great.
I love the guy (sometimes), but I’m with her at least on choosing one’s battles. I think this is beneath his usual standard and shit like equating LOL Pizzagate with LOL pedophilia is the Achilles Heel that makes him far too similar to his detractors. All the tankies are descending into antfuckery. They really should take a break. Left Twitter is a stenchful swamp from end to end.
I see the fight has moved on to PPG and that she’s getting her ass handed to her. That’s a little better.
What are Turbo Comments?
@Tarzie
The thing that shook my world view on liberals was their reaction to Ron Paul in 2012 and even in 2008. The refusal to acknowledge even that Ron Paul’s anti-war stance had any value *in itself* and that it was at least *interesting* that such a line of discourse could enter American politics via a Republican was staggering. The acknowledgment that Ron was a Republican with issues was not enough for them. It was a wall. Be liberal or be ostracized. I no longer think that liberals misunderstand entirely. They are extraordinarily focused on their advantage in any situation. That’s why they are so sycophantic. It may be unpleasant to deal with conservatives who are dumb like a pile of bricks but at least they are too dumb to notice when they are saying the wrong thing. Liberals never miss a beat. That’s why moral panics are genuine among liberals along with anti-racist hypocrisy. They never drop the mask. What we see now, 2 weeks out of Obama’s reign, is that liberal amnesia is not credible. That might be the explanation for why so many showed up at a gassy, nebulous Women’s March but so few show up at specific causes like immigration. They know what they have to say but they have to wait awhile before the cognitive dissonance lessens.
Liberals talk about anti-racism and how evil Trump’s real estate speculation is. Some rumors swirled about how his developments either expropriated or refused entry to blacks. They can’t go into that too much because for the past 15 years the greatest thing you can do as a yuppie liberal is flip houses to speculate on property, making rent and mortgages unaffordable to everyone worse off than yourself.
Well of course liberals closed ranks against Paul. However, I found the most strident opponents were people calling themselves Marxists and anarchists, hatefully spewing at the most anguished or qualified anti-imperialist support. Even though they didn’t devote a tenth of the rhetoric to the other Republicans, they scoffed at any suggestion that they were running interference for liberal imperialism. I don’t fault them for objecting to Paul. Tactical alliances are risky in a winner takes all two party system and he is, of course, a shitheel. It was the difference in how stridently and disingenuously they objected to Paul vs any Democrat that convinced me most US ‘radicals’ are liberal at heart. Same thing happened in Occupy. Liberal Democrats attempting to participate didn’t get half the grief Libertarians did. I think it’s mostly about aesthetics. The middle class snobs that dominate liberal-left politics hate the tacky overtness of right-wingers. Democrats have completely fucked over Black people but they make tasteful use of dogwhistles, careerist POC and simple silence.
I believe Ron Paul never had a chance not because of lack of irony needed to deal with any real public interface, but, simply because the hole dug by the current propaganda MACHINE is so empty, his relative morality, yes a useless tradition that needs to be repealed too, soon. Believing he lost public support which becomes public, nevertheless, has EVERYTHING to do with this digital transformer I am typing on right now. It was another Soros affair, which would be inside out, or game changing. The best game is to leave the amusement park. Instead, we are trapped inside with sequences of thought that don’t STOP at serial behavior.
In a more honest world where liberals and leftists would not have proven so self-interested I could conceive that the Libertarian penchant for insanely screwy logic and outright lies might have built up a store of hostility in radicals. Libertarians have a critique of the Fascist State and civil liberties and then comes, always, the racism, the classism, the privilege, and every other red meat, paternalistic prejudice and reactionary phobia you can think of. They consider it beneath their dignity to justify or examine their position. Point out that corporations are a kind of authority and they start talking about how they love that corporation’s products. Scratch a libertarian, find a Republican, as Rand Paul’s current lack of criticism of Trump exemplifies. Not that it applies. I think most liberals haven’t actually looked at libertarians enough to figure this out and they are just taking hints from liberals at large that libertarians’ nominal obsession with civil rights is weird and anti nanny state.
Honestly, the last candidate for the Libertarian party was the most pleasant libertarian I’ve ever seen.
Again, liberals are so stridently unpleasant that I can’t this bothering them.
Everyone who is not suicidal is self-interested. Ayn Rand was an idiot for thinking only the absurdly rich are self-interested, and that it’s a unique virtue and that the word “selfishness” means nothing but self-interest. No one here was praising Libertarians, only asking why radicals should hate minor Libertarian candidates with so much more vigour than they hate Clintons and even Bushes. If radicals fancied themselves to be 6-dimensional-chess players, and less liberal, I might have believed they were trying to get Rand Paul elected by attacking him from a liberal perspective, just like the liberals probably help get Trump elected by their constant liberal whining promotion of him. I believe Sanders supporters and Stein supporters were promoting bogey-man Trump before Clinton had even won the nomination, which also helped Clinton to win the nomination.
The non-existential problem is that almost all humans who can afford to buy cheeseburgers and cigarettes, obviously including the left, are too stupid to assert their own interest against bullshit, including overt and covert advertising, and in most cases, obviously including the left, that includes being too stupid to see any benefit ever to not spewing bullshit themselves.
I regret my “spewing bullshit” metaphor, since if someone literally swallows feces, I can’t fault them for throwing it back up again. The benefits of regurgitating all this figurative bullshit is less clear to me.
Word.
Sarte wrote Nausea
@Bitman
Agreed with you on campus sexual oppression.
Just as our society’s tolerance, indeed complicity, in rape culture means we should never try and determine a victim’s objective reality for them (nothing gives us that right), I feel that you are violating my justified outrage, in my mind, at Greaves’ spuriosity. It’s not for you or anyone to say how outraged I should be. That just makes my experience of Greaves Twitter that much harder to emerge from, if I ever manage. For my sake and for the sake of everyone who had to read Greaves’ Twitter thread, I ask you to stop
You’re not outraged. You’re a troll, by appearances, or at least you deserve to be considered one until you substantively respond instead of engaging in idiotic fun-making of something I didn’t say.
Oh good effort, Bitman. Really good. A pedo ring obsessive who is pro- “campus rape” feminism and even breaks character to demand a serious debate from detractors. I know there is a resident troll on this blog and he would never put on such a weak performance.
Breaks character? You know me 10 minutes. Your avoidance remains the defining feature of our interaction.
Hang on here, comrades. Bitman, I appreciated your contribution, but I also wouldn’t fault jessions for hearing a disagreeable tone in the impressive certainty with which you told them they’re full of shit. Of course, everyone here takes a tone from time to time, which is fine. But it’s also fine, and certainly not trolling, if the target gives it back. I trust no one will take this as an opportunity to do a he said/she said. Let’s just try to be a little more collegial. Based on the contributions made so far, no one meets my definition of a troll. It’s a shame that rancor is taking up residence, because apart from High Arka’s clowning, I think this has been a good thread.
I don’t think jessions snarking was entirely unresponsive, by the way, perhaps because the implication that it doesn’t matter if something is factually true or not if it speaks a larger truth or furthers an agenda that you endorse hits me as disagreeably as it does them. The sarcasm is more substitution analysis than evasion. As someone who was two degrees separated from a Lesbian whose life was almost ruined by a pedo scandal that was absolute bullshit and completely insane, I find the Get Out of Jail Because Trauma Card for anything “victims” might say or do genuinely toxic. Victims lie. Child victims are coached by adults. This is not rape culture propoganda. It’s fact as well as entirely consistent with common sense. It’s especially disgusting that this pass is issued in some quarters for every forum in which someone discusses an alleged offense. Hence fascist, probably CIA, scum, like Sarah Kendzior can take to social media to smear whole political factions based on some rapey emails she says she got and anyone seeking evidence is slimed as rape enabling.
While I think jessions is too flip about it, I agree that the culture around discussion of pedophilia, which weds religious zeal to prurience, is sensationalistic, hyperbolic and inimical to honest discussion based on facts and research. I also think the point that focusing on Ruling Class pedophilia has a minimizing effect on their quotidian crimes is worth considering, especially given that pedophilia is harder to prove and harder for most people to believe.
Your point that, as with all other big conspiracy theories, the scoffers haven’t earned the right to scoff by doing research is entirely correct and important. Your certainty that Pizzagate is a Republican op strikes me as excessive, though. I think it’s quite possible that it’s grass roots goofiness that has no real method to it at all and just happens to particularly appeal to people who hate The Clintons. I’m pretty sure Alex Jones, who IS a Trump operative, passed on it. That could be a distancing maneuver, I guess, since Jones is officially in the Trump camp, but it’s worth considering.
In case anyone’s interested, here’s a blog post that attempts to sift through the pizzagate findings. I haven’t read it yet but it looks sober and useful.
@poob
On a certain level it’s all nothing but group dynamics. There is short term, immediate benefit to identifying as “Left” and therefore “anti Right-Wing” when in an agitated drum circle of Occupiers.
Just as there is immediate benefit to running a War on Terror at home.
That people don’t imagine there may be consequences is stupidity but it’s a stupidty with a justification. There is also the fact that so many people’s idea of self interest is that the world can burn down tomorrow so long as they get their profit today. For a millionaire it’s a real estate deal or an investment. For an activist, it’s getting a pat on the head for being a good boy and asserting what the group believes. There is hardly any lack of orthodoxy among Antifa. The mob of idiots at Berkeley, even if they were just feds or a show, didn’t strike me as out of the ordinary. “Nazis are very bad and not good, this is a courageous statement” is pretty much where Antifa is these days.
I’ll withdraw from your line of thought here because I’ve lost the point of this discussion.
This conversation is a little unfocused I guess, but I think there are lots of good insights and observations from everyone who’s contributed so far.
@poob
I don’t know. The obvious answer is that radicals are all paid agents of the Democratic Party and go around infiltrating activist groups just to act as a bulwark against any threat to the Democrat base. Obviously, however inspirational Occupy was, the libertarian party vote, to say nothing of a gambled shift to Republicans like one of the Paul family, is a far more real threat to Democrats than any Leftist ideology. Trump won while losing the popular vote. That shows that the Democrat hold on power, at least for the party’s official candidates, is very tenuous.
I think, though, that Antifa are so entirely a kind of entertainment, a chance to puff out your chest, for people who will end up writing some shitty papers on a blog or in Jacobin, or subscribe to Jacobin, then go vote Democrat because it’s embarrassing to vote for a loser, unless the Democrats are assured victory, that it makes sense that they would feel smarter by standing against Republican-Libertarians and welcoming Democrats into the fold. A voice like Tarzie’s is exceedingly rare. Aside from the impossibly dense and pretentious writing of the “intellectuals” of Antifa, most everyone of them could just cover their mouths with one of those /laughing-tears/ emoji at every anti Republican statement one can make. “I approve, they are bad”.
One thing that I think now about Occupy, is that, for all its non-partisan hostility to “the system”, before Democrats crushed it and then co-opted it, Occupy itself never said anything explicit against the Democrats or Obama. Even though the Democrats and Obama were in power at the time. In a way, it was a movement that was born just to be co-opted. Since Democrats could say they were Occupy and with the 99% without anyone pointing out that Pelosi or Obama or Schumer or Clinton had been labelled as the enemy by any Occupiers. There was no history of quotes to even suggest that there was any animosity between those in power and the people in the parks. It just kind of “happened” that police removed them. So the Democrats didn’t suffer for cracking down on Occupy. Even afterward, the Occupy post-mortem has avoided pointing the finger at the Democrats and instead just celebrates the beauty of Occupy, the real Occupy was the friends we made along the way, it felt good, oh wouldn’t it be nice to have that feeling again, what are some pockets of people doing today.
The whole thing could have been a Democrat operation. Just look at how David Graebur turned out to be a rabid war mongering, Cameroon conference speaking, partisan hack.
As for the point of this discussion? I am participating on a blog throwing around ideas. You seemed to have a combination of hostility to Ayn Rand, to my overly Randian characterization of Libertarians, and to my lack of focus on Tarzie’s point that Occupiers and Antifa are more opposed to Libertarians than to Liberals. I hope I have rectified that in some way with this comment but I don’t need or demand you to stay in if you aren’t interested, whether the point has been lost or not. It’s all good.
At every protest when I ask people what is the point, invariably the answer comes back,
“this is great, people are meeting people they wouldn’t have met, connections are being forged, people are feeling an experience of freedom”.
I have never really felt safe at any kind of protest unless the person I’m talking to is childishly naive and nearly brain dead. I mean, to the point that I start thinking, “this person isn’t politically serious enough to be here, they are disgracing it”. When they seem a little smarter, I can’t help wondering if they aren’t working with the police. Unless they outright say cynical things about how it’s all just amusing and they don’t take it very seriously.
The closest thing to an activist genuinely desirous of putting on a competent show, is always someone who is nervous and eager not to say anything unorthodox.
Come to think of it. This whole segment of society seems more than a little beneath the dignity even of this blog. None of them are really worthy of any serious consideration from serious people.
This was me throughout Occupy. I felt Occupy was doomed from the beginning because, in New York anyway, there was such a preponderance of nitwits, low-functioning psychotics, liberals and apparent shady operators. I don’t think I found a single moment inspiring and when the city cracked down, it was nauseating and sad. I can’t think of any political experience that left me feeling more hopeless.
I’m starting to agree with this. A more optimistic way of looking at it is seeing this consideration as kind of a post-mortem, to see if it can ever be different and, if so, how. Lately I feel like really committed serious people should probably start fresh, going out into the field and leveraging the disquiet of people who are half-awake but not politicized yet. A major logistical problem is that those who understand capitalism’s predations from dire, first-hand experience can’t afford the luxury of political involvement. One reason why our politics is so stupid is that the movers and shakers don’t have any real skin in the game even when they’re not on the take.
“Lately I feel like, really committed serious people should probably start fresh, going out into the field and leveraging the disquiet of people who are half-awake but not politicized yet.”
I keep trying to force myself to do this, but I think I’ve resigned myself to just letting it happen when it happens instead of attempting to look for it. It’s frustrating investing time in a person only to watch them go full-on Hillary panic voter. Should I be using my time going to the Revcom bookstore, or a WWP meeting, or the Bill deBlasio March Against Fascism? Should anyone?
I’m fortunate enough that I get to do my ‘activism’ where I live and I’m the primary beneficiary and I would be an idiot to not be involved. I have other people in my building who are soft little leftists now but I think they’re open to more radical ideas (shit I hear one of them definitely is). Beyond that, my neighborhood tenant union is probably one of the stronger ones in the city.
So I’m set. I don’t know what to tell anyone else, or really to discourage them, except all the history and factionalism is fucking stupid, what matters in the present day is if you’re working with/for the status quo or not.
You know what, if anyone is new to this, go to a Lyndon LaRouche meeting just so you can have a dry run with zero stakes to see how this shit works. And then let me know if you’re bored enough to help me create a LaRouche splinter movement. I’ll be waiting.
Ha ha. It’s funny how little we try infiltration ourselves.
No, no, no and no.
Every now and then it occurs to me that just breaking down capitalist atomization by pressing the flesh in worthy small ways is a good on its own as well as politically nutritious. Then I forget and look at Twitter and blog some shit.
I’ve thought about going to things as a spy or an infiltrator but the part of me that doesn’t dread discovery and punishment fears going native.
“I feel like really committed serious people should probably start fresh, going out into the field and leveraging the disquiet of people who are half-awake but not politicized yet.”
Exactly what I’ve been thinking for awhile. For example, I’m ready to regard it as axiomatic that anyone worthwhile to talk to would be someone who’s seldom or never voted. (Meanwhile I regard any whiff of electoral cultism as an indication someone’s beyond help or worse.)
Wow. And, soooo obvious.
sorry. “One reason why our politics is so stupid is that the movers and shakers don’t have any real skin in the game even when they’re not on the take.”
wow
Apologies if I flew off too quickly. I’m touchier online these days for sure.
By no means did I want to suggest that any claim to victimization – particularly ones wielded against whole classes of people in the Kendzior style – should automatically respected. We know what Kendzior is. I don’t need to press this point, but I was referring to the unfortunate fact that there are grown children who were pandered/tortured as children that develop severely dysfunctional forms of compensation, the sorts of things that can make them unreliable witnesses. These people are the opposite of attention seekers. Journalists like Nick Bryant, who studied the Franklin Scandal for several years and wrote the definitive account of the investigations and cover ups that followed encountered this in interviewing victims – victims mixing things he knew independently to be true with things that he knew couldn’t be, and insisting the both were true when they stood to gain nothing from the falsehood, that kind of thing. It made documenting and exposing what they’ve suffered all the more difficult, but his book is a monumental achievement.
Another reason the subject interest me is that during the “memory wars” there were spooked-up organizations (like the execrable False Memory Syndrome Foundation) that devoted themselves to altering public perception around child abuse, including working to create a scientific literature designed to combat the veracity of recovered memories. To my knowledge no one has done a sufficient history of this period, though some academic work has been done which has shown the impact it had on media accounts.
For the record, I have no personal history with any stuff like this. Everything I know I learned from reading about it, and I started from a position of total incredulity. I’m very aware there were lots of false claims and a number of people who didn’t do anything wrong were convicted during the 80s-90s panic. It was absolutely horrible. But the panic also provided cover for the organized abuse that was always there, and I’ve come to detest the sneering dismissals of know-nothing liberals about not only this subject but the whole range of deep state crime about which they choose to remain willfully ignorant.
Clearly pizzagate is something else. I believe Alex Jones was pushing it (with some reservations) until that moron showed up at Comet Ping Pong with a firearm and an Infowars story in tow. Jones then scrubbed all references to Pizzagate from his media outlets IIRC. It’s true that I can’t prove it’s a Republican op – it stinks like one though, and whatever the conditions of its origination it’s certainly been weaponized for partisan gain.
I wanted to chime in too about activism and what’s to be done. I really like what Hummus said and I’m more involved in local outreach/activism than I’ve been in years. I’m working with local socialists (not DSA) on tenant justice issues and teaching ESL to non-native speakers, posting flyers – basically doing whatever I can to connect with those in need. It’s crucial to talk to new people and break through the atomization as you say – just seeing people stop on the street to talk to socialists feels like a win. It’s also personally rewarding to find someone whose got a prick for a landlord and can materially benefit from what you’re offering.
But one thing I’ve become acutely aware of is that I’m irremediably middle class, and I can’t really do much about that (though it’s very possible I will become considerably poorer in the months/years to come). I want to take an unofficial leadership role in some of the orgs I’m working with and even consider running for local public office (something the organization has set as a goal for the coming elections) but I also really strongly feel they should be led by working class people. I’m struggling with it. I’m just not sure middle class people should be entrusted with or seek leadership roles in organizations that need to remain working class in character. That includes me. The people I’m closest to in my life are not politically radical or attuned to these issues so I’m at a bit of a loss.
Look at the Suncell (TM), its progress, and invest in solar stock, MASI it appears to be the higher standard, or BrLP’s goto, now. I am, only, even poorer, but this group needs some twist, here and there… Surely, another topic to come up more and more in the not-too-distant future. I have tried to broaden the horizons on Mills’ blog I have belonged to since 08, to no avail. YOU SHOULD SEE how much Wikipedia has re-branded such excellent work, the denials, idiotic upon idiotic, of the US Patent Office, …, So, what are the tendencies of Soros, or Omidyartardation? I just keep falling in love with Kellyanne Conway!
Look at the Suncell (TM), its progress, and invest in solar stock, MASI it appears to be the higher standard, or BrLP’s goto, now.
total gibberish, as were your previous outings. Are you a not-very-artificially-intelligent robot, or a disinformation spook?
Could I ask the moderator why my previous objection to this obvious troll was deleted? Trolls are tolerated, but pointing them out is not?
Check the date. Was I wrong?
My charge of trolling was sincere but offered in a spirit of good ribbing. I don’t mind trolls that much and they can be fun. You seem after all not to be one. I don’t want to go into the reasons why I guessed you might be.
We are definitely discussing separate aspects of this. My main point is that the Antifa who have taken up the cause are lying and seem to have a nasty ulterior motive. I just can’t figure out quite what it is or if it is a mix of schemes they are up to. I understand the difficulties that former victims can have in being accurate and how this can lead to excessive accusations or to dismissal as a hoax. A double edged sword. I appreciate that point.
If I have to stay focused, then to bring it back to Greaves, that whole communist thread linking pedo rings with imperialism was not in the least concerned about how people misconstrue all the various difficulties of investigation to reach a conclusion that is flattering to the elites, let alone the perils of victim accounts. It really just descended to what has become all too common on the professional activist left and all its semi-willing collaborators: if you question their authority on what they call “child sex” then you are a pedo rapist and probably work for the New World Order secret government or you are their useful idiot. It’s Fivekian.
This whole moment after Trump’s win has created a uniformity of stupidity by “If you aren’t with us, then you are with the Trumpists” which is now a style of thinking and bickering that seems addictive to everyone but the most dyed in the wool trolls who don’t give a fuck.
To be fair, I have never found Greaves to be “open minded” to critique. He is one of the most ax to grind stubborn people I’ve ever seen. That he has read enough to have good ideas does not detract from the fact he is a ranter, who is unmoved by counter arguments. I assume he sees himself as someone who has reached an age where he doesn’t need anyone to tell him what to think. The problem with Antifa is how young and ignorant most of them are and they have that same crotchety confidence. The problem with the smartest among them is that they should know better but they think they are making a boss move by going along with it anyway. Nazi elites are bad, after all, and however bad Democrats may be let’s not forget that Republicans are evil.
From observing a few people I like morphing into idiots that see nazis everywhere, I’d say the allure is drama and the broad solidarity that such a childish, banal politics as “Nazis are bad” engenders. All the violence talk also makes middle class pussies feel badass. Weird seeing Marxists getting on a bandwagon that includes so much riff raff and which so clearly rehabs The Democrats. I also think it’s helping fascists on the other side of the aisle by literally willing organized, highly motivated brownshirts into existence, making otherwise inconsequential reactionaries famous and making over rank and file Republicans as moderates. It’s not harmlessly stupid. It’s reckless.
middle class pussies
Do you not feel that using “pussies” as a term of abuse is politically problematic, for obvious reasons?
Identity politics is neoliberalism, but surely the initial distaste for this kind of terminology was valid.
At the risk of opening a huge can of worms: Can you elaborate on this? I agree with you that calling Wiener a pedophile based on a dick pic to a 15 year old is disingenuous. Anything else? Surely you agree that, even if you don’t see sufficient evidence for some of these scandals, the alleged activities in most of them qualify as pedophilia and other forms of sexual abuse.
As far as Pizzagate is concerned, this proves nothing, but if you peruse the Wikipedia article it seems like the most blatant, easily dismissed, really laughable right wing hoaxes of recent memory.
Yeah. I offered that link before I read it and the article says nothing I didn’t already know. The case seems to rest far too heavily on the one Podesta’s creepy art. They imply the trafficker in Haitian children they’re also using as evidence is a procurer, when as I understand it, her agency is “rescuing” children from non-consenting poor families for paternalistic reasons. She’s bad, but the linkage to pizzagate is disingenous.
I’m kinda with you that there’s very little to be gained by immersion in a scandal with so little evidence. I watched a documentary on the Jimmy Savile scandal and found it credible because it wasn’t so speculative and weird. Even if the Podestas are up to their eyeballs in violated children, this case undermines itself. The incompetence of the scandal suggests to me that if it’s a calculated op, it’s difficult to see what interest it serves. It seems to discredit its promoters more successfully than its targets.
I would argue a half, a third of it are allegations that qualify as pedophile abuse or at least sexual abuse of various degrees. That doesn’t prevent the researchers from claiming all of it as pedophile rape.
Can you give an example of what gets called pedophile rape that isn’t? Is it about the age of the victims, like kids in their mid-teens, cause that does seem to expand the customary age range for pedophilia I believe. It’s my understanding that its the lack of sexual maturity that pedophiles are drawn to and that the diagnostic cutoff is 13.
Hmmmm. You are good.
I later realized you wanted me to list a run down of what I think is and isn’t
The allegations themselves.
Pedophile:
Dunham
some British MPs
A little bit of Savile
Haiti. Pizzagate.
Sexual abuse:
Savile, British MPs, Epstein-Dershowitz-Clinton-Prince Andrew. Pakistani gangs in Rotherham.
Haiti.Pizzagate.
Not in the slightest pedophile or sexual abuse: plenty of paying teens in a one off situation for sexual favors or photos. Anthony Weiner style or more physical affairs with teens.
All of these are labeled pedophile rape by the “researchers” and rumor mongers. The only one I would label as such are some of the cases of the British MPs at orphan boys’ homes. I think some of the evidence is at best credible but most of it is total fabrication. The evidence for the non pedo, non abusive stuff is more corroborated. The Dunham thing is admitted by Dunham and I don’t think it is even a slightly indecent thing. You have to be a moron or a liar to go “she raped her sister” based on Dunham’s description.
Epstein-Dershowitz-Clinton-Prince Andrew. 2 Jews. As evil a person as Dersh is, I think he makes a great punching bag more for anti semites as a living Jewish caricature. Targeted during Clinton campaign. Rich glitterati elites can’t find a hooker or a teen model to screw in NYC so they go to sex slave island.
The allegations are big on hysteria very slim on reality. Even in Epstein’s case (which I have not followed as closely as to have an opinion I can support) where there is investigation and testimony it seems so weird it looks like a setup of some kind. There is sexual content but the stuff that seems definitive does not seem like abuse. Epstein most documented crimes are really on the level of Trump’s pussy grabbing.
It’s interesting you mention the diagnostic cutoff. I’m not familiar with the DSM or other type of official scholarship. I would figure *Around* 13, depending on the body type of that individual. I guess what I listed above works on the basis that 13-ish is the cutoff.
I’m starting to wonder how familiar you are with the Savile and Rotheram cases if you’re putting them in the mostly hysteria column. As for Epstein, the complainant that busted him says she was paid to give a massage and he raped her. I also don’t agree with the implication that “paying” a minor puts it outside abuse. Even if the kid is soliciting, shouldn’t the adult decline? And how is non-consensual “pussy-grabbing” not sexual abuse?
Given that some of the children involved in the Rotheram case were 12yo, I’m wondering what, for you, qualifies as pedophilia.
WTF?
Pussy grabbing is sexual abuse depending on where and when and with whom. In the case of Trump, it’s false to call it sexual abuse.
I wouldn’t say that pussy grabbing is anything to get too worked up about either. We are talking about pedo sex rings and you want to virtue signal that you wouldn’t grab a pussy. Antifa circles are as obsessed with the spectacle virtue as liberal ones. I would not myself ever “grab a pussy” out of the blue but it’s disingenuous to pretend like anyone gives a shit.
As I said about Epstein, I wasn’t that familiar. I didn’t know she claimed rape. That completely changes it. I’ve mentioned Epstein only doing less than that with the 12 yo in an earlier comment and nobody corrected me.
I guess if 12 should qualify as pedophile then you can ask that question of your diagnostic cutoff scholars, too. I’d like an answer on that, if you would.
I also didn’t know that they were as young as 12 in the Rotherham case. I had read stuff about 16 years. Actually that’s a huge shocker to me. At the same time, if you go with the cutoff, it does sit on the border, doesn’t it. Really not very clear that these men considered their victims to be “immature”.
I didn’t mean to say that Rotherham was fake, either, I made the list and added to it after my comment. I’m not perfect in my commenting so you are catching a disorganized communication. Rotherham goes into the real column because the investigation concluded as much.
As for paying. What difference does it make then between someone paying and someone abusing. Do you make a distinction? I expect not.
I’m a little surprised you ask the question in a “what, if anything” form as if I have no concept of children when I pointed out the MPs at the boys’ homes qualifies. If you want to go by age alone, does Lena Dunham sticking marbles or something in her little sister’s private parts constitute pedophile rape? What, if anything, qualifies, if that doesn’t?
So my question to your WTF, after my corrections is,
what did Savile do that qualifies as abuse? Does payment make any difference? What do you make of the 13 year cutoff by your diagnostic psychiatry knowledge?
I also think I made it pretty clear that I don’t consider that abuse doesn’t exist but that it doesn’t all qualify as pedo rape. Now you are muddying the waters suggesting that I don’t call anything at all abuse.
The payment issue is not about paying a kid who is bizarrely soliciting. It is about paying teens. Are you suggesting that someone solicited by an older teen should refuse? On what grounds. And here you have the can of worms that nobody wants to engage.
Another thing about Rotherham is that it is generally pushed by right wingers, nativist Brits and racists generally. The retort to Savile and others, from the right, to any leftist arguing that Savile proves the British administration is complicit in a massive scandal, is “What about Rotherham, ay? Those fucking immigrant Pakis.” And so the conspiracy that the police in Rotherham are part of the New World Order of pedophiles doesn’t get much traction. It doesn’t fit in with the anti establishment, nominally anti racist, anti-semitic conspiracy theory about pedo rings. It’s just one more rhetorical device that the UKIP right didn’t need but got for free.
I’ll leave you for now with those three questions. Rhetorical or to be answered, however people want to take them. I think I’ve made my views fairly explicit and thanks to your follow up I’m satisfied with my further clarifications. I’m going to take a break for now and so I hope that isn’t interpreted as my taking offense or abrupt disengagement. I don’t think the topic becomes more interesting with further elaboration after this point as this is the impasse or the point of contention where the debate currently stands in the world.
If I were virtue signaling I wouldn’t have embarked on this conversation since the hardcore would put me at fault for even having it and for a number of ways in which I agreed with you. Trust that I really do believe non-consensual pussy-grabbing is sexual abuse and if done by Jeff Epstein to someone 14 or thereabouts I’d classify it as a very egregious kind. I don’t think your difference with me on this makes you a would-be sexual abuser. Though I disagree with you, I appreciate your candor and that you think independently.
Though I’m disinclined to go further with this, I want to make it clear, since you’ve mischaracterized me, that it was you who suggested paying made a difference as to the level of abuse, so it’s odd that you’re now directing my own question at me. Your response is underhanded like this in a number of other ways as when you invoked the use of the Rotheram scandal by racists as if that’s relevant to the actual facts of the case. I also did not ask “what if anything” I simply asked what. Here’s a clearer way I could have put it that may have tempted you less to remake it as moralizing insult: since you speak scornfully of people who believe things without having investigated them and your confidence in speaking of Rotheram suggests familiarity with the case, and since a court concluded that girls as young as twelve were involved, and you did not classify that case as pedophile rape, what do you think qualifies as pedophile rape? Since it turns out you weren’t aware of the particulars of the case, I withdraw the WTF that seems to have provoked bad faith. Gonna also decline to answer your questions since I feel that before I even started this reply the thread was in need of a vacation from this particular line of discussion.
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I so want to catch up on all this! Nonetheless, I have been trying in my own world to accomplish some things, a lot having to do with this topic. In any event, I just came across this on Wikileaks, from where I am finding all sorts of inroads to various connections or “concatenations” (one of my fav pet words)… Check out this found in the Podesta email file:
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/49019
The context of it seems, thru the back end, to fit into this “tweet” world, ‘sort of repeating. Believe you me, however, it is not the only thing I have found! Tarzie, thanks! Really, I can’t keep up with you (and, I love it).
to help clarify something way back in the thread: if I remember correctly, OLAASM is an acronym for Occupy LA something-something-something. It was my understanding that during Occupy, there were a number of OLA-ers tweeting from that account – eventually it became the single voice it is now. OLA and Occupy Oakland were by far the most militant of all the Occupy groups. It is my understanding that some of the OLA and OO folks were veterans of the WTO protests in Seattle in ’99. I agree with tarzie that the voice that is now “OLAASM” is a nice guy, and perhaps agree that he is small potatoes – but he (she?) has a very solid grip on the politics of the global imperialist/capitalist machine (despite being a bit of a one- note- sally these days). All the points made about lack of organized resistance – agree- that it plays into the hands of the nazis and fascists, and liberals in search of celebrity- agree. But I have to say I am so happy to see ANY sort of militancy from ANY left quarter as the AMBIEN DOSED LEFT has really got me down!! I think the average lib shrinks in horror from any sort of “violence” repping them in this country but I think the aggression/militancy of it ( violence which, imo, is inevitable anyway) has made a sort of psychological space for the left, (and maybe physical), that has been lacking. I am quite uneducated about political/social history, but from the little I do know – yes, nothing has been accomplished without organizing…but I am not aware of anything being accomplished without violence/aggression ignition of some kind. Occupiers were literally “unallowed” to be in public – people in hijabs, black people, homeless people- “unallowed” in public spaces these days – not necessarily by decree, but by…vibe and/ or lethal force. (frankly, I was just happy to see white people punching white people instead of white people “punching” everybody else!) The fact is, “our” arms, it seems, will never be long enough to reach a president, or a bank CEO, or any one of the actual players, and I doubt the general population will ever get around to reading, much less understand, Greaves’, or Cordeliers’ or Tarzie’s threads/blogs etc. But everyone knows their arms are just long enough to reach a nazi’s face. This matters, I think.
It’s late, but also want to say thank you so much, poob and tarzie, re: vegan. I couldn’t agree more! (btw, it was vegan posters on twitter that got me right 😉 bad place to organize, but boy, if something is repeated long enough, sooner or later you will follow a link and, eureka! twitter is “neutral,” – used like marketing. and those dogged, absolutely dogged vegan twitter posters…. I am grateful to them everyday.
new here – ready for the beatdown, lol, tis one way to learn, so…bring it!
it seems that my long comment has acted by way of a thread-killer; sorry. but in any event, it would have been hard to return here once i’d made myself look so bloody feeble and all.
i’d forgotten to add that if one clicks my back garden photo, it gets a lot larger. and of course that herpes simplex is often triggered by fevers and sunburn, not just…too many pinto beans (smile).
hope you’re well, tarzie (and all).
Trump now simultaneously a Chekist and fascist: liberals.
Also the garden looks really nice I’m going to grow vegetables on my roof this year and maybe apiary next if I can get away with it in my building.
Do you know it turns out I live 150ft down the block from a Brooklyn heat vampire of note?
PCR’s support of g-wad… Seems to make sense to me.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/02/18/stakes-trump-us-paul-craig-roberts/print/
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/02/18/stakes-trump-us-paul-craig-roberts/
Also, i thought i replied to Hummus’ comment on Chekism with my Kellyanne Conway defensive statement (because i think all CNN is, is pedo…). It showed up not so.
Does that apply to Jake Tapper’s interview of Kellyanne Conway?
“Trump now simultaneously a Chekist and fascist: liberals.”
And don’t forget he’s a reactionary as well!
Any thoughts on this?
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/02/20/president-trump-has-been-far-too-nice-to-the-mainstream-media-n2287759?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
I mean, considering on the other hand, if Titus Frost 5 hour expose on trails of criminal activity stemming from JAMES ALEFANTES to Killory, to the ends of the world, …, if his capturing of the data that has been false-flagged at Comet P as being the “ONLY” place a bullet did hit its target, that hard drive the bullet hit thru-the-wall, not even the floor…, so what!, if Frost’s “guy” has delivered ON DECEMBER 5, 2016, the secret data ON THAT HARD DRIVE (with more than just his life threatened) and it has been sat on by ALL the offices of degeneracy, in covert harmony [sic], if even Jeff Sessions has had a copy or has a copy now, WHERE ARE THE PEOPLE TO DESTROY THE PRESS ON THIS MOST NERO-ESQUE CRIME IN HISTORY?
REACT, REACT, REACT. Wait ’till I get to foreign affairs…. Perhaps, yathink, we should take care of the ghosts in the white house first, then, maybe even, the commodity exchanges? There is a left of left.
I think Schlicter misses the forest for the trees. The media isn’t punching itself in the face with these stupid stories because they like looking dumb. They’re doing it because the Deep State tells them to. The only real question is what method of removing Trump the Deep State is using all this noise and thunder to prepare the public for.
Do you know what, even, TF has to say, and fairly recently, all-in-all, but mainly having to do with the smoking gun and this skin-in-the-game? I feel strongly that that one foot should drop on this, and the hollow filled. That is, inside the covert -connecting-concatenating-to-the-world-identity-far-from-entity-‘cept-molech?-me-whining-bs. where duz ht cum frum?
2nd part, 1hr:59mins to 2hr:06mins, clinton to follow
Did you listen to the 1 minute piece of Pod yelling. Do you think that is the lesson for everyone? Too dumb? Yes. But, I believe it, the Molech or Metropolis side (view?). The White House has the evidence now, and i want to tell the world. And,THIS IS WHERE ‘”they'” get their training, delivered by rail, i m sure, from pod-likers. continuity
2nd part, 1hr:59mins to 2hr:06mins, clinton to follow
https://www.facebook.com/events/1836777416597012/
Stop bullshit luxury condos being made out of public property.
Bedford Ave & Union St Brooklyn, NY 11225
Saturday, Feb 25 10:30-11:30am
I don’t know what disgusts me more, that DSA put their stamp all over this shit, or that my comrades have utterly failed at providing an alternative to this because they’ve all been too busy sodomizing themselves with theory and the written word.
Anyway I’ll be there.
Ugh I’m serious it makes me wretch some of these fuckers tag their emails with Cory Booker quotes
‘Sure would like to quote back to “them” America by William Blake.
is anyone else concerned by tarzie’s absence? do any of you know how to contact him (or his partner) to check if he’s simply busy w/ life in other venues and is okay?
@ hummus: clicking my backyard rocks allows you to see that thru the chokecherry trees at the SE is our old truck garden, perhaps a third of an acre or so. i’ve forgotten its size by now, but we grew a hella lot of veggies and flowers in it. now, in the wee gardens, mainly flowers. soul food.
Tarzie: Ha ha. It’s funny how little we try infiltration ourselves.
I’d go much further. Sure, blog owner was making an aside. But I’d say infiltration was both funny, and psychologically revealing. Infiltration is, I suspect, not a tactic, or technique, but a mindset. And it’s the mindset of someone whose profile fits that of a psychopath. Hanging around with your enemy in order to betray them, after all, is a perfect piece of Nazi betrayal, and many Jewish people would say so, were they not entirely dead.
Infiltration should, in a democracy, be illegal. People – one should imagine – be able to convene and discuss, without a dead-eyed ex-paedophile (and apparently, many infiltrators are, in fact, child-abusers) manipulating the discussion. But, such abuse of democracy is, of course, not to be discussed. Because such discussions involve invoking language that – of course – can no longer exist. And that’s why every politician is basically a shell of a being, and probably a sex-criminal: they have long-lost the ability to think.
So, what about Feinberg, Dyncorp, and sex?
Really, or Nick Kollerstrom, saying quite clearly how something like Dyncorp could be the detritus from the destruction of German, NOT the result! Who is infiltrating now?
Germany’s example, good timing also, Leni Refinstahl. Hitler did not care for the Olympics, so much. Back to The Net, “The Greatest Story NEVER Told.” Or, finally, from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, ” Hitler’s dog sketch art BELONGS in a museum.
it finally occurred to me the other night, tarzie, that i’d left out a key word in my request to please delete my: ‘why i’m not a vegan’ story. i should have said that it had sat there *unanswered* for six weeks, yada, yada,
but anyway, congratulations to both you and cordeliers on having been published in the Am. Journal of Economics and Sociology. also, thanks again for your gary webb series; it was formidable!
best to you and all here,
wd
I don’t recall that I obliged myself to answer your comment or any others. As I suggested, I felt the need to take a break from my blog, and only skimmed the comments that were left during my hiatus. It should come as no surprise that people’s rationales for exploiting animals and fouling the environment are not something I am always keen to engage with.
strictly speaking, of course you’d never obliged yourself to answering my comment, nor others’ comments. but as you’d said something close to “unless you can make a good case for why…i should leave and not come back”, and i said close to, “all i can do is tell my own story…”, etc. i reckon i’d assumed that you would respond to it. i’d voiced my concern on the thread that something had gone amiss in your life causing you to be absent for so long. but yes, i did finally figure out why you’d been absent.
http://ow.ly/iIrR30apXlk
but if my ‘rationale’ strikes you as unworthy, counterfeit, or worse, okay then. i’m just trying to save myself as best i know how; immobility sucks bigtime, as does hurtin’ fer certain.
best to you, in any event.
I did no such thing. Jesus, the hutzpah of attempting to gaslight when the record is only a scroll away. Are you dishonest or does centering yourself in everything impede comprehension? The discussion is here
It was you who dramatically announced your departure as you’re doing now with your standard dishonesty, attention-seeking and passive aggression. I’d made it clear that there is no vegans-only rule. That was your inference, making shit up for drama’s sake. My suggestion that you hazard a defense of your non-veganism before you leave was borderline rhetorical.
As it happens, I didn’t read your rationale because I’d taken a hiatus from the blog. On my return, you asked that I delete It. Since you had decided you didn’t want anyone reading it, I didn’t read it at that point either. Then you returned to pick a fight about it and to make another dramatic exit. Just fucking go already before your metamorphosis into troll is complete.
addendum: consider me happily self-banished.
Hey, Wendy, just dial in a little more polarity. Don’t get stuck on the outside (inside?). Tarzie is dynamic, and, NOT a singularity, wink, wink. I think that last gesture was meant for him, but, get “inside” of it, or outside. What I mean, most, is thanks for your real effort, and more. I have been looking forward to it, that read!
Oops, still not available for reading…